very decent return, up a sliver (0.8%) on 2019, when Bloomsbury joined the e-book panel. Stripping out Bloomsbury to compare like-for- like across the decade in which we have been compiling this data, 2021 was the fourth-best year of e-book volume returns and the second- best since 2015. Hachete is once again the UK’s top consumer e-book publisher, shiſting 17.6 million copies to Penguin Random House’s 13.8 million. Even though Hachete has had that number one position ahead of its rival for most of the past decade, the giants had been quite close for most of the 2010s; in 2018, just 3,364 copies separated the two. Yet Hachete has been pulling away in the past three years. Acquisitions are a big part of this, particularly the ongoing bedding in of Bookouture (bought in 2017) and a company-wide filtering through of a Bookouture-esque strategy of more dynamic pricing.
There were hits aplent and for the second year in a row Hachete’s success was led by Delia Owens’ Where the Crawdads Sing (Corsair), which spent 27 weeks in The Bookseller’s Publisher E-Book Ranking; Hachete said it sold more than 106,000 e-units in 2021. Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet (Headline) spent 17 weeks in the ranking, while Robert Galbraith’s Troubled Blood (Litle, Brown) contributed 13 weeks in a row. There must be some regret about Julia Quinn, though. Piatkus did very well with the
HarperCollins 3
24m 18m 12m 6m
Weekly E-Book Ranking Entries in digital chart*
Author
1 Richard Osman 2 Delia Owens 3 Douglas Stuart 4 Maggie O’Farrell 5= Julia Quinn
5= Lee and Andrew Child 6 Robert Galbraith 7 Mhairi McFarlane 8= Peter James
8= James Patterson 8= Leigh Bardugo
Entries 59 27 22 17 15 15 13 8 7 7 7
*Number of times individual titles hit the Weekly E-Book Ranking top 10, 52 weeks to 1st January 2022.
breakout star of winter 2021 as “Bridgerton” mania swept the world—although breaking out some two decades aſter publication—as it saw four different titles in the Georgian romance series hit the weekly ranking. But as the original titles were signed in the days of yore, when publishers did not fight so hard for e-books, HarperCollins US division Avon had world digital rights to the first four books, which it sold directly into the UK. Bloomsbury’s 74% rise partially comes from adding Head of Zeus, and its digitally savvy genre fiction lists, in 2021. But BookTok helped, too, particularly with Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles, one of the first
Pan Macmillan 4
24m 18m 12m 6m
real successes that was pushed by the social media platform. Celia Imrie’s Orphans of the Storm was a digital smash, while one of the other real e-book drivers was YA/adult SFF crossover star Sarah J Maas: A Court of Silver Flames was a hit and there was a backlist boost when it was announced the A Court of Thorns and Roses series was being adapted by Hulu. PRH had, of course, the biggest digital book of the year in the sizeable form of Richard Osman. His The Thursday Murder Club dominated both the E-Book Ranking and the Bookstat chart (see p08), with his second novel, The Man Who Died Twice, close behind. HarperCollins suffers by way of comparison to 2020, which was by some distance its record year in digital, but it still enjoyed some massive hits, led by Abigail Dean’s Girl A, which HC said sold more than 105,000 copies. The début thriller also shiſted 160,000 units across all print editions, and that relatively high “e” to “p” ratio is undoubtedly down to the hardback being launched in the teeth of lockdown last January. Douglas Stuart’s Booker winner Shuggie
Bain topped the Pan Macmillan pile by some 10,000 e-units, but as you might imagine, the Pan genre powerhouses formed the base, with great years from Ann Cleeves and Peter James in particular. Bitersweetly, the late Lucinda Riley was perhaps the real star, with two of the publisher’s top five sellers in e-book, and nine of its top 50.
Simon & Schuster 5
24m 18m 12m 6m
Bloomsbury 6
24m 18m 12m 6m
2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021
‘E’ volume 6,904,000
7,441,000 9,607,000 10,632,000 11,945,490 9,260,990 9,149,741 9,213,770 11,722,686 8,812,046
TheBookseller.com
Growth 7.8%
29.1% 10.7% 12.4% –22.5% –1.2% 0.7%
27.2% –25.0%
2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021
‘E’ volume 4,583,000
5,437,000 6,000,000 5,537,000 4,200,000 4,183,386 4,183,386 4,192,000 4,420,000 3,831,014
Growth
18.6% 10.3% –7.7%
–24.2% –0.4% 0.0% 0.2% 5.4%
-13.0%
2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021
‘E’ volume 1,370,000
2,607,000 2,600,000 2,593,000 2,442,000 2,734,513 2,071,016 1,789,291 2,283,878 1,851,770
Growth
90.2% –0.3% –0.3% –5.8% 11.9% –24.3% –13.6% 27.6%
-19.0%
2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021
‘E’ volume n/a
n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a
785,909
1,033,559 1,802,336
31.5% 74.0%
07
Growth
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